Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Here are some tips that I have found have made my food storage moreorganized, useful, and rotated. I find building and using your foodstorage to be an ever changing thing, and I keep adapting as I learnmore. I have a food storage area in an unfinished part of my basement(I know we're lucky to have basements). I also have a little cupboardspace upstairs I use for day to day cooking.

MY FOOD STORAGE AREA: I call this my food storagearea, because it's just against a wall in my basement. In my "dream"home, I'll have a whole dedicated room, with all sorts of super coolshelves and stuff, but for now this is like heaven compared to mycondo before. I have three areas along the wall. One is for long termfoods, the shelves are for three month supply, and I have an area forwater. Ok- ok, I have a fourth area - it's called a big fat pile ofnon-food items, and appliances that are waiting for a new shelf areaI also keep some water and my 72 hour kits upstairs in case we had toevacuate, or my whole basement got smooshed in a disaster. Oh and thisreminds me, I need to put up a blanket against that window to blocklight from getting onto my long term food. I just moved everythingaround and before this wasn't an issue. Light makes food go badfaster.

TIP FOR KEEPING MY STORAGE ORGANIZED: In my foodstorage room downstairs I try to keep like foods together on shelves.That way I can quickly get stuff assessed and know where everything iseasily. I like to keep fats together, sugars together, condiments,and all sorts of other logical (to me) groupings.

TIP FOR MAKING USING FOOD STORAGE EASIER: I put allthe ingredients I need for making bread on one shelf in one of mycupboards. That way when it's bread making day, I just pull all thethings off that one shelf and I'm ready to go. Having to dig, and pushthrough other ingredients is something I have always hated aboutbaking, so this way I'm ready to go right away.

TIP FOR ROTATING MY FOOD STORAGE: These are ALL thecans in my upstairs pantry. How is this Food Storage? Well you see bykeeping very, very few of my three month supply types of foodsupstairs, I am FORCED to go downstairs to get food out of my foodstorage and use it. When I go grocery shopping, I come STRAIGHT homeand put my food in the basement. Then when I need food, I have to godown there (send one of my cute little kids) to get it. I know itsounds annoying, but if I don't do it this way, I'd end up usingeverything I just barely bought first, and my food storage in thebasement would just collect dust.

TIP FOR USING MY LONG TERM FOOD STORAGE: One way Iencourage myself to use my long term food storage such as grains andlegumes is I keep smaller containers of them upstairs. I know thiscontradicts my previous tip a little - but it's different- trust me. Isave containers from nuts I get at Costco and use them to store thesmaller quantities of my long term foods. This makes making pancakes,or muffins and all that kind of stuff with whole grains a lot easier.I also use my legumes a lot more in soups and chili's.

TIP FOR REPLACING FOODS I'VE USED: Placedconveniently on a work table right next to the food storage is a padof paper for me to write down things I take out of my food storage soI can replace them next time I'm shopping, or next time there is asale. My dear husband knows if he takes something off a shelf he BESTbe writing it down on that paper - or else ;)

HEY WAIT! How did this get in here. Ok fine- when Igo grocery shopping I DON'T immediately put the food in the basement.I put it on the stairs DOWN to the basement and deal with it later.

For anyone feeling OVERWHELMED right now- here's alook at what my food storage area looked like 3 years ago. THIS was mybefore and after. Through a lot of time, dedication, and sacrifice (noDisney trips for us) I have been able to build it up to a little lesssad than it was.

Thanks Julie! What an inspiration. With sacrifice and hard work, you can have a great food storage just like hers. Be sure to check out Food Storage Made Easy for more great tips and ideas.

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comments:

This was a very helpful post. Your situation is similar to what I have set up myself, so taking many of your tips will allow me to easily make my food storage better! Thanks for taking time to detail this for us.